Burger King servants cheesed off at games mag

Greenfield Online were surveying punters' responses to $4 game featuring the Burger King himself. They had screen shots of the whole thing to show folk to gauge their responses.

But Kotaku.com got hold of these screen shots from sauces within the takeaway industr.

Now, while the rest of us might think that the concept of the burger-flipper entering the highly-competitive games market might be a bit of a joke, the hacks at kotaku.com took their sauces seriously and released a yarn about it, complete with pictures.

Then, yesterday the editors got a letter from a learned friend at Greenfield threatening to batter the magazine in court for revealing Burger King's trade secrets.

In a similar case to that of Apple versus its blogger fans who were also accused of releasing trade secrets in a bid to silence them, Greenfield demanded that Kotaku take down the images.

Kotaku admitted that the hacks would trade off some of their Fair Use rights for a mess of breakfast sandwiches and perhaps a round of coffee, but have not heard back yet from Greenfield. Meanwhile, the story and the pictures are still up.

The Kotaku piece was positive about the game concept, so we don't know why Greenfield flipped. According to Kotaku, the Burger King plan was to release three games that merge Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat with burgers. "With with the Angus Cheesy Bacon Steak Burger going for US $3.69 and Oblivion asking US $59.99, one of them is overpriced," the site says.

More on Kotaku here. µ